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Russian Scandal: The Fusion GPS mess just keeps getting messier. New court filings show that the opposition research firm that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee hired to dig up dirt on Donald Trump also paid at least three journalists. For what? Was it part of a Democratic plan to spread fake news about Trump?

XAutoplay: On | OffIt may be that people are becoming jaded about the news emerging on Fusion GPS. But, increasingly, it appears to be the nexus of a massive campaign by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party for a post-election investigation into Trump’s supposed “ties” to Russian officials.

Now come two stunning revelations that only make the Fusion GPS picture sleazier, if that’s possible.

The Washington Examiner reports that Fusion GPS paid three journalists between June 2016 and February 2017. It came in an affidavit filed by Fusion GPS co-founder Peter Fritsch, who noted that the House Intelligence Committee had sought information “related to transactions between Fusion GPS and certain journalists.

Fritsch asserted that the payments in question “are not pertinent to work related to Russia or Donald Trump.” Sounds clear cut. But the Examiner’s Todd Shepard notes that “One of the documents filed by lawyers for the House Intelligence Committee said each of the three reporters who received payments had written about the Russia probe, which could indicate that reporters were using Fusion GPS’s work to write their stories.”

That would seriously undermine Fritsch’s assertion. Moreover, in another filing, the lawyers maintained that Fusion GPS “brokered meetings for (Trump) dossier author Christopher Steele with at least five major media outlets in September 2016, including Yahoo news.”

Did Fusion GPS intentionally mislead Congress? It seems like a real possibility.

Meanwhile, as has previously bee reported, neither the FBI nor the Justice Department have been able to “verify or corroborate” the allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump that came from the Trump dossier.

More and more, it looks like a giant setup, intended to trap then-candidate Donald Trump into implicating himself in a plot to undermine the U.S. election. But it was Clinton and her bought-and-paid-for lackeys in the DNC who were in fact colluding with Russian officials.

We promised a second revelation, so here it is:

Daily Caller investigative reporter Chuck Ross reports that the U.S. law firm BakerHostetler paid Fusion GPS $523,651 from March 2016 to October 2016 to investigate Bill Browder, a London-based banker who was behind the passage of the Magnitsky Act, a set of U.S. sanctions that the Russian government strongly opposed.

And who paid BakerHostetler to make that payment to Fusion GPS? Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, through his company, Prevezon Holdings. Indeed, it turns out that Fusion founding partner and former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson compiled the information for Katsyv.

This is yet another Russian link to Fusion GPS. The man whom Fusion paid to concoct the Trump Dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele, interviewed a number of Russian officials for his Trump research, and was paid $168,000 for his work by Fusion.

The picture emerges of Fusion, the Democrats and the Russians colluding to eliminate a wild-card politician that could be trouble for all of them.

Moreover, in a separate transaction, the Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie paid out some $1,024, 408 between May 2016 and the end of that year, the records show. The biggest check was $365,275 made on Oct. 28, 2016, just days before the election.

And who was Perkins Coie? The attorneys for both the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Agai , the point is, the fingerprints of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and Russian officials are all over the infamous Trump Dossier. But, as of yet, there has been no actionable evidence of actual ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

More and more, as we said, this looks like a classic setup — a rather clumsy one, until you consider that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were pretty sure she was going to win. All of this would have simply been swept under the rug by deep-state bureaucrats in the Justice Dept. and at the FBI on behalf of President Hillary Clinton.

Based on this, we’ll reverse the logic that the left has employed against Trump now for well over a year: If it turns out that the Clinton campaign and DNC not only funded Fusion GPS but also directly or indirectly colluded with Russian officials to subvert an American presidential election, they will be liable for criminal charges — and possibly jail time.

As for the three journalists we mentioned above, if they used this information as the basis of their Russia reporting, it will turn out to be a scandal from which U.S. journalism will have trouble recovering. The media is already held in such low repute by the public that it’s hard to think it can go lower. But it can.